243. Schubert’s Parting Notes

The Concert - Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Works for solo piano by Schubert performed by Charlie Albright, piano on March 24, 2013.

• Schubert: Impromptus, D. 899, Op. 90
Schubert: Sonata in B-Flat Major, D. 960

In the late 1820s, all of Franz Schubert’s hard work and struggle seemed finally to be paying off. His performances were increasingly well received, and he was at the height of his compositional powers. Yet, even as his career took off, his health began to deteriorate, and his music increasingly focused on darker emotions. In 1827, Schubert wrote the four Impromptus for piano, his opus 90—the first work we’ll hear on this podcast. The title belies the seriousness and heft of these pieces, which are hardly light or off-the-cuff.

The following fall, Schubert’s health took a turn for the worse—but his compositional output was seemingly unaffected. Sometime that year, he began sketching out a series of piano sonatas, including the one we’ll hear: his very last instrumental work, the Sonata in B-Flat Major, published posthumously as D. 960. These sonatas weren’t really understood or appreciated during the 19th century, when they were published; musicians and critics found them structurally aimless, too long, difficult to make sense of. Today, the sonatas are widely recognized as among the composer’s most powerful works, imbued with a sense of the composer’s reckoning with life’s biggest questions, including his own mortality.

We’ll hear both the Impromptus and the Sonata in B-flat played by pianist Charlie Albright, in a recording from the first of three concerts that he played at the Gardner highlighting Schubert’s music for piano.